Back in the days when black-and-white television was the norm, Pete Deksnis delighted in watching one of the few shows broadcast in living color.

"No matter how lousy the show was, you looked at it," said Deksnis, who owns one of the first mass-produced color TV sets that began rolling out of an RCA factory 50 years ago this week.

Today, with color TV the rule, not the exception, it's deja vu for Deksnis -- he goes out of his way now to watch one of the relatively few shows broadcast in high-definition television.

"HD drove me back to network television after years of apathy," said Deksnis, who has his antique TV parked next to his HDTV set in his living room. "I'll even check the afternoon HD soap opera on CBS, but for a few minutes only, to enjoy the crystal clear picture."

HDTV, because it offers dramatically higher quality video and audio than standard TV, is hyped as the biggest technological advance in TV since color.

Yet HDTV has not quite caught on with mainstream consumers for many of the same reasons that held back color TV sales for more than a decade -- the high prices of sets, the fact that only a few shows and major events were broadcast in color and some initial confusion in technological standards.

Consumer interest in HDTV is on the rise, yet it's hardly as fervent as the early interest in color TV.

In those early days, "people would flock to neighbor's houses to watch TV in color," said Lynn Bartos, cable, media and entertainment analyst with the research firm Ipsos-Insight. "Where we are now is people may have heard of this term HD, or high definition, but people don't really know anything about it."

On March 25, 1954, the Radio Corporation of America's plant in Bloomington, Ind., produced the first CT-100, a $1,000 set (approaching $7,000 in today's dollars) that historians call the first mass production color TV. Competitors Westinghouse and Admiral beat RCA to market with a color set, but each produced or sold just a handful.

RCA churned out about 5,000 CT-1oos. Called The Merrill, the model hit stores in April 1954. It had a 15-inch diagonal screen, although the viewing area was about as big as a standard sheet of paper. The 160-pound unit had 1, 012 parts, 36 vacuum tubes and 150 feet of wire. Only 93 CT-100s are known to be still in existence, according to Deksnis, a resident of Asbury Park, N.J. His own CT-100 no longer functions.

Thomson SA, the French firm that now owns the RCA brand, has two of the working models, which it will display Thursday on the QVC shopping network along with the latest HDTV models.

"I've seen them sold for $1,000 on EBay," said Ed Reitan, a Los Angeles color TV historian who also owns a CT-100.

Back in 1954, that price was a major barrier for most consumers, who were happy enough with their larger screen black-and-white sets.

"A thousand for that first set was absurd for that small of a picture," Reitan said. Later in the year, RCA introduced a 21-inch set for $1,000, and cut the CT-100 price in half.

The CT-100 used the RCA-developed technology that was adopted as the national color TV standard by the Federal Communications Commission in December 1953. In adopting that National Television Systems Committee standard, which is still in use today, the FCC reversed its 1950 decision to adopt a rival standard developed by CBS-TV, which promoted a mechanical system that used a spinning disk to create colors on the screen.

The CBS system was not compatible with existing black-and-white sets, and for a while, some set manufacturers included a connector in the back to make the set color-ready with an optional converter, Deksnis said. The system promoted by RCA, which owned NBC-TV, used all-electronic technology that was compatible with existing broadcast technology.

Just as today's HDTV receivers are promoted as "HD ready" or "HD compatible," in the 1950s, "color compatible, that was the big thing," Deksnis said.

Perhaps the biggest barrier keeping consumers from buying the early color sets was the dearth of programs to watch in color. In 1954, there was a total of 68 hours of color programming broadcast for the entire year, said Dave Arland, spokesman for Thomson.

The colorcasts were usually reserved for major events, such as the 1954 Tournament of Roses parade, the first coast-to-coast color broadcast of a full program.

Although an increase in the number of color shows like "Bonanza" and "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" helped sell more color sets, color programs were still rare until the mid-'60s. Deksnis, who bought his CT-100 used in 1963 and now has a Web site devoted to it, said he would watch any show as long as it was in color, even "My Mother the Car," a clunker some critics have called the worst show of all time.

It wasn't until 1964 that color set manufacturers shipped more than one million units per year, Reitan said.

And it wasn't until 1966 that NBC became the first of the three TV networks to broadcast a full schedule of color programs. Today, hundreds of TV networks are available on cable or satellite TV, and the only shows still in black and white are reruns of programs made in the '50s and '60s.

Yet for the first four years, HDTV was the "slowest growing entertainment application available," largely because only a handful of programs were broadcast in HDTV, said Aditya Kishore, media and entertainment analyst for the Yankee Group.

But Kishore said HDTV sales began picking up two years ago after the FCC instituted a voluntary plan designed to get broadcasters, cable and satellite TV providers and consumer electronics makers to work to increase delivery of HDTV programs and signals.

About 9 million U.S. homes have purchased a digital television product, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The average cost of an HDTV display has dropped from $2,000 in 2002 to about $1,300 this year.

"For the average person, it's sort of getting close to affordable," said Kishore, who forecasts that by 2007, 40 percent of homes will have an HDTV display.

Ipsos-Insight analyst Lynne Bartos, however, believes consumers will not see enough of a difference between regular TV and HDTV to make an immediate switch.

"If they are in the market for another set, then yes, they're buying an HD," Bartos said. "I think people will just wait. After all, you can still get a picture."